Michal Suchanek wrote: > FWIW if the first alternative was always used what use for > alternatives is there?
there's the following reproducable case: 1. you have neither iceweasel-l10n-de installed, nor any of myspell-de-de, myspell-de-ch and myspell-de-at. 2. you have more packages installed that do recommend either myspell-de-ch or myspell-de-at, and less packages than that that do recommend myspell-de-de. 3. iceweasel-l10n-de recommends: myspell-de-de | myspell-de-at | myspell-de-ch 4. since aptitude does install recommended packages by default, you would imagine that an 'aptitude install iceweasel-l10n-de' would result in iceweasel-1l0n and myspell-de-de being installed. but that is not what happens. what happens is that aptitude tries to be extra clever and will install iceweasel-l10n-de and either myspell-de-at, or myspell-de-at plus myspell-de-ch, or myspell-de-ch (depending on how the other packages recommendations are distributed between the two 'unwanted' myspell packages). here, aptitude is doing this *against* the recommendation that i set as beeing the maintainer of iceweasel-l10n - it installs new packages without respecting my expressed will in debian/control. > If the input-all was always chosen it would make the alternative > dependency useless, and the package would always work. nope. per policy, the meaning of an alternative is (have not looked it up, my wording follows here): "install the first package if none of the alternatives is already installed". apt does implement it according to policy, aptitude doesn't. -- Address: Daniel Baumann, Burgunderstrasse 3, CH-4562 Biberist Email: [email protected] Internet: http://people.panthera-systems.net/~daniel-baumann/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
